Death

"When you think your worth is determined by outcomes, you’re asking for trouble. When you equate getting something good as being a good person, you’ve made a fundamental error.  I don’t know how many people are aware but there was an election the other day. It was a pretty big deal.  Anyways, the incumbent lost and he hasn’t conceded to his successor. It’s pretty embarrassing but it reminds me of the games nights I’ve had where one or two friends would either lose their minds when they couldn’t win (to the point where she tried to cheat) or quickly move on to something else while making excuses for not winning."

— Jason Henry, the Psychology of the Sore Loser

Read the article and get back to me.

I think the other quote I want to add goes as follows:

"Also, trying to cheat your way to victory isn’t victory. It’s an admission that you don’t know how to play, you don’t care to learn how to play, you don’t respect the other players, you don’t respect yourself and you’re taking this far too seriously."

I think that's very telling — since I'm the one usually accused of taking the game too seriously, and it not being enough "fun."

Looked at it from a psychological point of view, it becomes clear that the argument of the game being about fun isn't so much a defense as it is a demand.  It's a statement by people who aren't having fun; who need fun.  Who feel threatened by anything that suggests they won't get fun.  Players who browbeat the DM for more magic, more privileges, less encumbrances, less chance of being made dead, are players who are definitely trying to cheat their way to "winning" by manipulating the ultimate "winner":  the game adjudicator.

They can't bear their characters dying the same way that a sore loser flips over the board when their desperate attempt to seize all of Europe in RISK goes sour; or when they've just lost their queen in some unforseen way; or when winning becomes that thing in their lives that will make all the shit and garbage they've had to bear all week long needs balancing against "Hey, I killed the dragon."  These sore losers need the win.  It's what gives their lives meaning.

Judging from the writing on the subject I've seen, and occasional videos of D&D players rage-quitting; and the nature of the arguments being made in defense of no-death and no-wandering monster evaluations of the game, plus sites like Puffin Forrest who go long and hard about what players hate about the game, it's easy to draw the conclusion that certain players are living viscerally through the games being played, to a degree that they just can't take another hit against their wish-fulfillment needfulness.  I personally think it is more this than "narcissism," which is an easy well to go to.  Though, I admit, that has to play a part.

I can personally remember games I lost as a kid, specifically sports, where it really hurt to lose.  Where personal consequences about self-esteem were intensified by the whole school also knowing about the loss, and about our being directly involved (and "at fault").  Fuck, those were really hard times; and some of those I played with became passionately deranged about making sure we'd win.  I remember being that person for a time, when I played hockey with the bloodlust of an NHL enforcer, deliberately boarding, spearing, hooking other players and such, because "winning" was more than a drug, it was self-esteem and righteousness and a lot of other pressures that kids feel too viscerally.  I admit — and I'll never think this without a deserved bit of shame — that as a kid, I deliberately injured other kids.  I did it with my parents watching and no one took me aside, not my parents, not my coach, not other players, and said, "Stop doing that."  This was the era of 1975-77.  That's obviously not how it is now.

What stopped me was getting hit, getting minorly injured ... and starting to read books after 13 that began to sort me out with respect to my fellow human.  I had friends who explained things like reactive behaviour to me, who helped educate me towards seeing that "needing" to win was less about winning and more about what the rest of my life wasn't giving me.  One of the reasons D&D appealed so intensely with me when I discovered it at 15 is that here was a game that wasn't about winning or losing, but about working together and overcoming problems.  Little did I know that this aspect of D&D was the one that many players hated.  They didn't want to work with others.  They didn't want to solve problems.  They wanted to do it all themselves and they wanted the problems to miraculously melt while pouring "winning" into their backpacks.

I cannot grasp how a person who pockets from a sure-bet feels like a winner.  That takes a cognitive dissonance I don't possess.

This post is supposed to be about character death, so I'll draw a line from what's been said to the subject at hand.

D&D has always incorporated death as a part of the game; it began, after all, as a war game, where chits were removed casually from the board when they were "killed."  It became about role-playing later, organically, from the premise that the board combatants were anthropomorphized, particularly when they would survive numerous fights.  Sometimes, the participants became so attached to some of the fighters that they were "retired" rather than played until they lost, or died ... because the attachment grew too strong.  Those sentiments slowly became associated with the larger milieu that became D&D. 

Attachment to player characters is both a boon and a curse.  On the one hand, attachment makes the game feel meaningful and awards excitement to the players on behalf of fictional stand-ins.  Without that attachment — which is a biological component, connected in part to the way human beings invented religion out of the natural world — D&D isn't a beloved past-time.

But for some people, that attachment is TOO strong.  If you'll forgive me descending into the dirty muck of politics again, we come around to the quote that starts this post.  The candidate was a sore loser; and a great many Americans had become so invested in the candidate, and what he stood for, and his magnificent capacity for standing up to the storm and owning the libs, what when the loss came, these American's couldn't bear it.  They still can't.  The feeling is very like many people had, me included, when the candidate won on his first time out: shock, fury, incomprehension ... and an unrelenting resolve that everything was very, very wrong.

On the night the candidate won, I rushed to my blog and swore a vow that I wouldn't talk about the candidate, that I wouldn't mention him, ever.  I broke that vow a few months ago, when it ceased to be relevant.  But I made the vow because I knew, within an hour of his plainly winning, that if I didn't tie myself to a chain, bitching would take over this blog.  I had to stop myself.  And for four years, I managed it.

Death is the game challenge.  It is one thing to figure out how much junk can be loaded on a wagon, or one's encumbrance, or tactically figure out how to handle the monsters in a tower ... or work out the right answers to the king whose trying to force you to marry his daughter, if role-playing is your thing.  There are lots of things in D&D that require resolve, thoughtfulness, innovation and sheer guts ... but death is on a whole other level.

Death asks YOU, the player, not the player character, to master yourself in the face of a loss that may be inconceivable.  It means not rage-quitting the game and humiliating yourself; or rage-quitting your country and ending up in prison for years, because you couldn't manage to deal with the fact that your candidate lost.  Death, the only serious loss inherent in the game, demands that you have Ethics, Honour and Character ... none of the things had by someone who screams at a DM that they're not getting enough treasure, or that it isn't fair that their character died when a giant rat randomly turned up.

Ethics, in that a recognition exists that the dice don't mean anything if there aren't consequences.  As a moral philosophy, ethics defines how we award value to things that bring us, as a group, the best results in co-habitating and living with each other.  An ethical person is not merely someone who obeys the law, but comprehends why the law exists and why the spirit of the law is more important than the wording.  Therefore, if no law exists, we can still see what law ought to exist, because people other than ourselves are influenced by what we do.  The rage-quitter, the carper, the manipulator, the game-player, they are all hopelessly self-involved; they can't see that their behaviour affects others, so when their character dies, all they see is their loss and the abuse that falls on them.  They can't see that living up to the convention is better for everyone, much better than everyone getting "their share."  The key to ethics is to appreciate that not everyone can always get their share, because that's an impossible standard.

Honour, in understanding that my not getting "my share" is fine when I get enough to continue participating at something I respect.  Self-respect being the key, since being honourable means living up to a code of behaviour that is deserving of the respect of others.  A player who carps and complains does not care about gaining respect.  They care only about what they get.  I stopped beating other hockey players not because I fell in love with my fellow man, but because I decided to like myself, and cease to act in a way that I found intolerable.  A player who can bear up under the death of a character does so because they are too dignified to let their equanimity be broken by something that can be endured with grace.

Character, in that being a person who is respected, and who is patient and considerate of others, fares much better in this world when things go bad.  Of course, bad times are not pleasant; and of course they are not desired.  But when persons of character rise above the bad times, they are able to do so without having been poisoned by those things.  I have gone five years through bad times; but steadily, for this last year, things have steadily improved.  And now, here I am, despite those times, feeling ambitious, looking towards the future, making plans and still having hope.  My character survives, because it is stronger than the hits that come.

Bearing the death of a character is a challenge.  One that, obviously, most players think they're going to fail.  They won't even try, which is why they set the rules so they don't have to try.  And because they set the rules that way, they learn nothing about themselves, or what they're capable of bearing.

That's not only sad.

That's pathetic.

“A coward dies a thousand times before his death, but the valiant taste of death but once. It seems to me most strange that men should fear, seeing that death, a necessary end, will come when it will come.”

— Shakespeare, Julius Caesar